The Fight for Civil Rights: Then and Now

The A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast is a discussion about current events, their historical context, and building the world in which the A Nazi on Wall Street story takes place. Even though the Civil Rights Movement primarily takes shape after the 1940s, the Elusive Films team made a conscious choice to include this topic in our series after the historic Black Lives Matter marches inspired in part by the death of George Floyd in 2020. We could not reflect on recent current events without talking about these historic forces. They are essential to understanding where we are and how we got here.

To our great fortune, Pulitzer Prize winning civil rights author Taylor Branch joins Jay and EJ to discuss this important topic and reflect on the differences and similarities between Black Lives Matter and the movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, SNCC and others in the 1950s and 1960s. We hope you'll tune in to this timely and salient topic with us. 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Because I was told many times trying to finish graduate school. There's a good dissertation. And there's a done dissertation.

Speaker 2 0:22

[inaudible]

Speaker 3 0:22

Welcome to a Nazi on wall street podcast because every time history repeats, the price goes up.

Speaker 1 0:28

I am Dr. Jason Weichselbaum. I am a filmmaker and historian and expert in American companies doing business with Nazi Germany

Speaker 3 0:36

And Jay Russo. I'm just a regular guy who got freaked out by the last administration and is just trying to figure out what is really happening G and I created this podcast in part to help promote his project, a Nazi on wall street, but to also discuss troubling current events and give them historical context, Jay, my friend, how are you doing? I'm doing okay.

Speaker 1 1:00

Uh, we are recording this episode on May 19th, 2021. And you know, there's a lot going on at this current time, uh, in current events, some of it promising some of it traveling as usual as we've recorded these episodes throughout the spring of this year. But, but ultimately I refuse to give into despair. I I'm pretty hopeful and upbeat. How are you doing well? I

Speaker 3 1:23

Think things are looking up, you know, I mean, as we speak the house just passed the resolution to move forward with the January 6th commission. I think that's great. Still has to pass the Senate, you know, at the time of this recording. So in the future, people will be laughing at, so they thought they were going to get a commission for January six. Oh no, no, no, no. But right now things are looking pretty good.

Speaker 1 1:49

Okay. The word on the street is that, you know, it's still gonna happen in the house. The Republicans don't go along and it seems like they probably won't, there'll be S select committee, which also has subpoena power can also do basically the same things. It's more of the season of giving a chance for bipartisanship having that chance rejected and then the Democrats moving forward anyway, which is kind of what we would all like to see if change can not happen, uh, in another way

Speaker 3 2:17

Was Bengazi a bi-partisan venture or was that mainly brought on by the Republican? Yeah.

Speaker 1 2:22

All six versions of the committee. Uh, yeah. Uh, yeah, that was mostly a Republican venture because it was, uh, based on false premises in the first place that somehow, uh, Hillary Clinton was responsible for attack as that she had nothing to do with that was handled fairly responsibly as well as it could have been and given the circumstances. And of course, compared to an attack on our Capitol that killed people and tried to prevent our election from being, uh, adjudicated. Yeah. It seems like the scope and context is quite

Speaker 3 2:56

Well. Time will tell. I think that I'm feeling optimistic. I personally speaking my wife is about to give birth to our second child in less than three weeks. So I'm very excited about that. Things are starting to get back to normal. I'm able to meet with people and conduct my life more and more. Like I used to back in the day now that more and more people are getting vaccinated, my mom was able to travel all the way across the country to visit my sister and her children out in California for the first time, since before the pandemic. And they're having a great time out there and it's great to see the photos of them playing around and having that bonding moment, which, uh, it's just, it's really comforting to see. And so it's just a sign for me that things are moving back to normal.

Speaker 1 3:45

I mean, that's, if we're talking about things that are going to be very different by the time folks listen to this episode, the, the pandemic is probably going to be the biggest one I would imagine. And perhaps not, you never know. Uh, we speak a lot on this podcast about our history. Doesn't exactly repeat, but it does echo. I work in this industry now and I invested interest in monitoring the state of the pandemic and it's changing so rapidly. Now the cases are dropping so quickly and now the focus is more and more on fighting it worldwide. And in the U S it's, we're going to be in the, what I call, uh, the after times. So I'm curious to see how things go this summer into the fall.

Speaker 3 4:24

Yeah. Like people refer to a certain era as post-war. This will be post virus, post COVID. Yeah, yeah. Post

Speaker 1 4:32

COVID post COVID, U S there's a lot of work to be done. The vaccines are our magic there. The Emma RNA vaccines are amazing. So, so yeah, so we should be hopeful. We should be hopeful. And we're going to talk about movements today, which are kind of predicated on hope. You don't really have a movement unless, uh, you have a hope that something is going to change as a result of that movement,

Speaker 3 4:53

Right. About hope and optimism. Jay you're you're a white guy. Right? Okay. I'm

Speaker 1 4:58

Jewish. And of course, we've talked many times on this show about how, uh, white supremacists see us as a Alon mill. Wiki's metaphor was a terminators, you know, but for all intents and purposes, uh, I am a white guy and I acknowledged my white privilege.

Speaker 3 5:14

Yes, yes. I am also very, very white. Hey, Jay does race. She doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 5:19

Absolutely. Racism exists. I wouldn't be a doctor of a history in my rarefied field without that acknowledgement, or that would be very weird to study, to study the Holocaust and Nazi Germany for almost two decades and worked at some of the most prestigious respected places like the U S Holocaust museum as a researcher. If I didn't believe that concept was real. So yes.

Speaker 3 5:42

Yeah. If you said, no, you probably would have some spleen into, do you see you're fired from this gas you're fired from this podcast? Well, now that we got that out of the way, I would like to preemptively apologize to everyone of color for our following takes on today's topic. Because like we just said, we're two white guys. Who've lived with immense privilege. And we realized that our explanations are going to fall short here, no matter how much care we take to get things right. But truth is discrimination and prejudice based on skin color is not our lived experience, but it is our duty to talk about it. Not only because of obvious reasons like equality is good, but also because as white people, we play a part in this too, as members of the power holding group that could most easily silence or discredit movements like black lives matter. And I guess one thing that upsets me is the fact that the term black lives matter is even a controversial one. I hate that a group of people asking not to be murdered has turned into such a trigger topic for certain people, but I am going to try my best to break down black lives matter. And its immense importance in recent years

Speaker 1 6:58

Anti-racism is predicating our conversation here to step back for a minute. We just said, we're white people. We're going to talk a little bit about black lives matter. We're going to contextualize it in history. We have an wonderful, amazing guest to do that also for a long time. People thought, you know, it's like, if I just don't say the N word or you know, if I'm not like overtly racist out there, then like I'm fine. But like our culture is basically steeped in racism and sexism and homophobia. And so the metaphor I like to use is like, you know, we're kind of, uh, washing it all the time. You know, we go out of our house and we get some racism on us. We get some prejudice on us from like things we interact with is structures, economic, political, cultural, and we have to take a bath. We have to wash, we have to maintain our perspective. So that's what practicing anti-racism is. To me, it's acknowledging the quote unquote washing is us acknowledging that we're in this particular society with all these biases built in and that we have to keep working on it and keep acknowledging it and keep pushing back on it. And, and that's how we get to a better place

Speaker 3 8:00

Society. So I hope we know the history in America of how poorly white folk have treated black people over the past. Oh, I don't know, 400 years. It should come as no surprise to most of our listeners that police given their position of power in on the street interactions are among the most egregious abusers and facilitators of white aggression against minorities. And this practice has a long dark history dating all the way back to the 18th century, Southern slave patrols back then white volunteers developed slave patrols, also known as Pattie rollers, which were squadrons that acted as vigilantes in 1704. The first slave patrol was established in South Carolina. Eventually all states with legal slavery had slave patrols. And yet this J they were actually the first publicly funded police force in the so by design, the very first police force in the south was made just to subjugate black people. They mainly focused on enforcing discipline and policing slaves. They captured and returned fugitive slaves. They quashed slave rebellions, terrorized slaves in order to prevent rebellions, including beatings and searches of slave lodges. They broke up slave meetings and kept slaves off of roadways. The patrols had broad influence and powers. They could forcefully enter anyone's home if there was any suspicion of sheltering, fugitive slaves and during the American civil war slave patrols remained in place after the civil war and the reconstruction period. The former slave patrol groups joined with other white militias and formed the Klu Klux clan.

Speaker 1 9:46

Just so folks know, we're talking about a pretty wide period of time from chattel slavery in the U S through the end of the civil war. When the southerners dressed like dead Confederate soldiers and sheets, that's how you get these Klan outfits to terrorize the newly freed black folks who had just been freed from slavery, the civil

Speaker 3 10:04

War, meanwhile, early police forces. The south began to take on the role of policing and regulating the movement of African-Americans who had gained their freedom. New laws were put in place to restrict their rights, which were known as black codes. According to some historians, the transition from slave patrols to police forces in the south was seamless. I

Speaker 1 10:27

Was just thinking of this great book by an author named Kahlil Gibran Muhammad called the condemnation of blackness. That's quite good. And I pulled it out in many, uh, many, a Twitter discussion where there's a lot of pushback to a race, this history, because it is you can't spin it. It's embarrassing to people who would like to idealize American history. Blackness was criminalized essentially, and codified as

Speaker 3 10:51

You've put it by the late nineties century of local and state governments began to pass Jim Crow laws. These laws enforced strict racial segregation in schools, parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, and other public places. This era saw a rise in lynchings and mob murders of African Americans with the police not arresting the perpetrators in 1933, Arthur F rapper reported that it was estimated that at least one half of the lynchings were carried out with the police officers participating and that in nine tenths of the others, the officers either condoned it or had been seen winking at certain mob members during the assault. African-Americans meanwhile suffered police brutality such as the 1946 beating of Isaac woodwork in Batesburg South Carolina and due to the brutality of Jim Crow laws. Many African-Americans fled to Northern cities where they thought they would find reprieve in a less racist area of the country, but they experienced police there as well.

Speaker 1 11:54

I was just listening to NPR and they were talking about the rap scene in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that kind of has built up recently. And, and, uh, it was really in response in part to this terrible massacre that occurred in 1921, there was a thing called black wall street because black folks were segregated. There were only certain places where wealth could be built up. And, uh, Tulsa was one of those places and it was, it was really a heyday for a time. And then white people came in and it didn't like this. And there was a terrible massacre there. But, um, anyway, one rapper wanted to start a new scene there more recently and people were saying, no, there's no scene here. And he built it up and then ended up buying one of the Klansmen's houses that was engaged in the massacre. And is now, it's now basically like a, a headquarters for this burgeoning rap scene, which I thought was really cool. But yeah, of course, black folks are moving north when stuff like this

Speaker 3 12:44

Is happening, this is terrible. Tell us a massacre is just a case in point of how sheltered most white people like myself were brought up because I never heard of Tulsa Oklahoma's black wall street and the massacre that happened there, it took me just a few months ago when I saw HBO's the Watchman. Have you seen this show? No, I have not seen the show. So it is a HBO series that continues the story of the comic book story written by Alan Moore. Back in the eighties, you probably had seen a movie by Zach Snyder that came out about a decade ago, but for those of us who were expecting a justice league movie were very much surprised when the opening scene of the entire show was the Tulsa massacre. Oh my gosh, I didn't know that they depicted the entire thing. And I had no idea. It was an actual thing. The entire show is based off of that incident. And it carries through the entire plot. After I completed watching the entire thing, it was the most important racial themed television show. Since roots came out, it really was a phenomenally done show and it really brought race and racism and what it means to be a black person trying to establish themselves in a world full of white people who just want to bring them down no matter how hard they try it,

Speaker 1 14:15

Contextualizes what's happening today. I mean, I feel like it's the right show for this moment. We're in this podcast is typically like 1930s and forties history contextualized with current events. So we talk a lot about fascism. We talk a lot about right wing populism, uh, dictators, the new deal and chances to re-invent America, but we realize we'd be very remiss to not talk about black lives matter and how important it is. So this episode is, is slightly different in that we're contextualizing this history. We're immersed in this, in this moment right now. And things like the Watchman, you know, are reflecting

Speaker 3 14:50

That I'm not going to get too far into it, but if you haven't seen the HBO, show the Watchmen, please check it out. It will hopefully open your eyes, but it's also a really cool story as well. Continuing on the civil rights movement was the target of numerous incidents of police brutality in its struggle for justice and racial equality, notably during the Birmingham campaign of 1963 to 1964. And during the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. Funny thing though, it was the media coverage of the brutality that finally sparked national outrage and public sympathy for the movement. And, uh, grew rapidly as a result, Martin Luther king Jr. Criticized police brutality in his speeches. Furthermore, the period was marked by riots and response to police violence against African-Americans and Latinos, including the Harlem riot of 1964, the 1964 Philadelphia race riot, the Watts riot in 1965, the division street riots in 1966 and the 1967 Detroit riot

Speaker 1 15:53

Blacks.[inaudible] also Stonewall, right? Like this is hard at this period.

Speaker 3 15:58

And in 1966, the black Panther party was formed by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale in order to challenge police brutality against African-Americans from disproportionately white police departments, that conflict between the black Panther party and various police departments often resulted in violence with the unfortunate deaths of 34 members of the black Panther party and 15 police officers

Speaker 1 16:22

Talk about being white and being socialized in this, in this racist culture. You know, I didn't know what had happened to Fred Hampton until I was, you know, well into adulthood. The police came in and shot him in his bed while he was asleep. I mean, this is brutal stuff. Fred Hampton is one of the main leaders of the black Panther party. It's hard to overstate just how much violence there was in this period

Speaker 3 16:47

In the United States race and accusations of police brutality continue to be closely linked. And that phenomenon has sparked a string of race riots over the years, especially notable among these incidents was the uprising caused by the arrest and beating of Rodney king on March 3rd, 1991, by officers of the LAPD, the atmosphere was particularly volatile because the brutality had been finally videotaped alive by a civilian and widely broadcast afterward when the four law enforcement officers charged with the assault and other violations were acquitted. The 1992 LA riots broke out according to a 2015 and 2016 project by the guardian, more white people are actually killed by police in raw numbers than black people are. And I keep getting that fact thrown at me on Twitter all the time by people that are trying to prove a point that racism no longer exists in America.

Speaker 1 17:46

You don't say yes, I had never experienced that. And by never, I mean always,

Speaker 4 17:53

But

Speaker 3 17:55

Here's the funny thing, Jay, after adjusting this finding based for the fact that the black population is much smaller than the white population, then twice as many black people are killed by police per capita than white people are our recent study in 2019. Now suggests that number has increased to three times and most shockingly. And this is a common theme throughout this entire episode, 99% of killings by a police officer between 2013 to 2019, do not result in criminal charges. How

Speaker 1 18:27

Much injustice does it take before people do something? Yeah, I'm really thinking a lot now about the relationship between the civil rights movement and the black lives matter movement. There are plenty of studies out there that show Martin Luther king was unpopular that the civil rights movement was unpopular. But when those images of the dogs and the hoses were broadcast and the people's homes respectable white people's homes, I'm using air quotes, even though you can't see me on the podcast. And people learned who bull Connors was, who was directing this police brutality opinion started to shift because a it's the images. You can spin something like people do on Twitter, but when you see it, it's undeniable. And of course now today, EJA, as you just mentioned, all these tragic deaths of many are being recorded is everybody's got a camera on their phone in their pocket.

Speaker 3 19:17

And that will definitely come to play later in this conversation. But I also want to be clear that black lives matter. Didn't actually start with police brutality. It actually began after the death of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin at the hand of an armed vigilante on February 26th, 2012, Trayvon went out and walked to a local seven 11 store where he bought candy and a drink. As Martin was returning from the store to the twin lakes neighborhood in Miami gardens, Florida, George Zimmerman, a volunteer quote neighborhood watch unquote person spotted Martin Zimmerman called Sanford police to report Martin who he said appeared suspicious. There was an altercation between the two individuals in which Zimmerman shot Martin and killed him. Zimmerman claimed self defense and was actually charged in Martin's death. On July 13th, a jury acquitted Zimmerman of second degree murder and of manslaughter charges awaiting his acquittal. The movement began with the use of the hashtag black lives matter on social media activist, Alicia Garza posted on Facebook, quote, black people. I love you. I love us our lives matter. Black lives matter and quote GARS his friend, Patrice colors shared those final three words as a hashtag writer and immigrant rights activist, Opal Tometi offered to build social media platforms for it where activists could connect with one. Another colors once said at a Ted quote, black lives matter was a call to action. It's a tool to re-imagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. And, and so then

Speaker 1 21:02

Many of us, including you and I, we live through this, right? So I remember all of this and the outrage. And then the foundation was built because then the tragic events in Ferguson happened, what just a few months later, you're

Speaker 3 21:18

Exactly right. Jay, the movement gained popularity in the summer of 2014, where two more deaths caught the public eye, Eric Garner and Michael Brown on July 17th, 2014, Eric Gardner, a father of six was killed in the New York city borough of Staten island. After Daniel Pantaleo in New York city police department, officer put him in a prohibited choke hold while arresting him video footage of the incident generated widespread national attention and raised questions about the appropriate use of force by officer Pantaleo. This is where the I can't breathe. Chant came from Garner's last spoken words. The grand jury chose not to indict that police officer. Then on August 9th, 2014, J Michael Brown Jr. An 18 year old black man was fatally shot by 28 year old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis officer Wilson responded to a robbery call. He filled with brown, and then as the team was running away, the officer shot him. Brown was due to start college two days after he was killed. Officer Wilson was also not charged for the incident. Personally

Speaker 1 22:34

Will never forget. And I'm sure many people seeing this and people who any sense of compassion will never forget the I can't breathe. And it's so frustrating because the immediate portrayal and not just the acquittals, but then the kind of media portrayal, when there is outpouring of anger, I live in Baltimore, Maryland where it, Freddie gray also died. And there was an uprising here too. I'm not using the word riot. As you see, and using the word uprising, media coverage of that event, of course it showed some of the destruction of property. We lost a beautiful CVS, sorry, CVS. But then what we didn't see was that the people of Baltimore came out and cleaned it up the next day, the whole community came out with brooms and swept everything up. And then there were protests, peaceful ones, but it was an intense, intense police response. And that's, I feel like EGA, what you're going to talk about is that the police response to the response, which is outrage in the community is just fueling this, this cycle of outrage and violence.

Speaker 3 23:37

Yeah. I lived only a few blocks away from Fruitvale station in Oakland, California when Oscar grant was killed, that entire experience was pretty intense for the entire time that was happening. That, that one hit close to home for all of us living out in Oakland. There's a film about that. Yeah. It's literally called Fruitvale stage that came out 2013, I think, uh, Michael B. Jordan,

Speaker 1 24:00

It was really well done. You know, it's all about that day. Like the whole day. It's just, you could just be going about your day and then all of a sudden your tragic death and murder at the hands of a police.

Speaker 3 24:11

Yeah. So for weeks after these deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, hundreds of people who'd never taken part in organized protests before took to the streets, tear gas, rubber bullets, anger, all boiled over Ferguson's governor called in the national guard. Hashtag black lives matter was used on social media over 50,000 times a day, the black lives matter movement took roots and gained momentum. As black people continue to die at the hands of white police. And it was a cycle of killings then protests and then no criminal charges and then amnesia. This was a time when America's first black president and attorney general were in office. And although his administration attempted to address the now widely recognized inequality that exists between police departments and communities of color activists at the time thought Obama needed to do much more, that much more needed to be done and who can blame

Speaker 1 25:11

Them. Right? There's an activist who kind of became more prominent locally here in Baltimore, his name's DeRay McKesson. And he came out with this thing called a campaign zero. And it reminds me again of, you know, the unpopularity of the early civil rights movement, which now we don't really understand because we think I have a dream speech and everybody's behind it, but that's not really how the history went. But anyway, similar skepticism from, you know, the majority, uh, white citizens and from the media, they are the audience for the media, but a dirty McKesson came out when saying, okay, well we're getting criticism that we're just, you know, rioting out there here is a policy considerations. And it was basically a 10 point plan, which is really interesting because a black Panthers many years earlier had a similar 10 point plan and was like, here are the things we need and it's stop broken windows, policing, you know, over policing neighborhoods. They're already experiencing, uh, economic disadvantages that already have stuff in demic to impoverished areas or urban decay. And so on looking at police contracts and, uh, not letting police operate with immunity, you have some sort of accountability. You know, I think that gave the movement a little more, uh, momentum, especially amongst elected official.

Speaker 3 26:21

In fact, massively complex systems at the federal state and local levels exist to perpetuate police violence. And politicians are almost always wilting and squeamish in the face of bringing any real accountability to public departments for fear of retribution or losing control legal doctrine in America compounds this problem. Qualified immunity is, uh, a leader well doctrine that essentially shields police officers from persecution and legal retribution police are also protected by union contracts, which makes it very difficult for them to be fired. Police officers also have an all too cozy relationship with district attorneys and all of these ingredients taken together, create a culture where police officers are licensed to kill and almost always get away with it. And then things started to change in 2016, when a backlash started appearing on social media, mainly caused by the rhetoric from the then candidate, Donald Trump, some started using the slogans all lives matter or white lives matter. And blue lives matter. The following year hate crimes hit a 16 year high in the United States, killings of black people at the hand of white police continued. And each time the stories barely made any news. Donald Trump essentially sucked all the life and oxygen out of the media. Black lives matter was no longer a lead story. That was until 2020, where Ahmad Arbery was killed while out for a jog and his Georgia neighborhood in the middle of the street by armed vigilantes by the 21st of May, the men involved with the shooting had been arrested in faith murder charges, but in less than a month after our Brie's death, Brianna Taylor and emergency room technician was fatally shot by police in her own apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, no one was immediately arrested and her story remained largely under the radar. Since the media was then focused on the global pandemic at the time. And then in Minneapolis, Minnesota 46 year old George Floyd fell victim to the economic downturn as a result of the pandemic, losing his restaurant job and then tested positive for COVID 19 suspecting Floyd of using a counterfeit$20 bill, please, officer Derek Shovin held his knee on George's neck for several minutes. And George died calling out for his dead mom. The world watched and started speaking out now with over 40 million people out of work, a hundred thousand Americans dead of COVID at the time, a white nationalist in office. And then what the black community saw as a televised public lynching of a black man. You had the perfect conditions to see an emerging act of rebellion. Black lives matter stepped in here as a unique ribbon tying together the outrage at white vigilante murders who killed people like Ahmad, Aubrey and Trayvon Martin, as well as the state sanctioned extra judicial executions conducted by police officers in the killings of Michael Brown, Brianna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others, countless others. The message that black lives matter suggests that all of this needs reform from the stand your ground laws in Florida that allowed a citizen to murder a child, walking home from seven 11 to the laws that permit police officers to walk after they take a life of the street. I think

Speaker 1 29:50

You you've said it really well. This is a turning point, right? The perfect storm, all these different elements all at once, you know, and doing a preparation for this episode and just going back and reading and trying to get some perspective. There's a New York times article that said, you know, black lives matter. It might be the largest political movement in us history. And th basically to back up their claim, they just started trying to estimate and count the amount of the numbers of people who came out to protest that summer of last year of 2020. As we record this last year, the numbers of people that came out are just massive. I saw personally a little kid, maybe seven, eight years old, young black girl. She decided to have her own protest. And she went out. It was her and her sister, I think not much older. And they came out with pots and pans, just walking down the street in Baltimore, yelling black lives matter. They had their own protest and I'm walking down the street. I cheered for them like I'm I'm with you. Everybody was out. And the crazy part is that it's a pandemic, right? So th the fact that everybody was out in this at this moment, I don't think can be understated. I mean, as a historian for me anyway, I think it's hard to fathom. I think we're going to be talking about this for a really long time. Yeah. I am very excited to introduce our guests today. Taylor branch, he wrote a trilogy of books on us, civil rights history America. In the king years, he went a Pulitzer prize in 1989 for parting the waters. The first book in that trilogy is a wonderful person we've talked together and I'm so happy to have him here today. Hello Taylor.

Speaker 4 31:30

Hello, Jason. Nice to be here. Thanks a lot. So,

Speaker 1 31:33

Uh, Nazi on wall street podcast, which you would not think would be a odd cast to talk about civil rights history. Typically what we've been doing is we've been talking about the history of the 1930s and forties, and using that history to talk about current events and parallels. But because we talk about current events, we would be remiss not to mention black lives matter, which was such an important part of not just last year, but in recent years. And so we wanted to be able to talk a little bit about civil rights history in the fifties and sixties, which you've written extensively on and the black lives matter movement of this past year. So I was curious about your thoughts of just how these two periods relate to each other in your mind, the similarities, differences, and things that jump out to you.

Speaker 4 32:16

Well, as a very general response, the black lives matter implicitly recognizes that the public discussion that the public politics about race has receded since the 1960s, when there were progressive voices and liberal voices that were enacting reforms that even the most conservative people treasure today, nobody wants to get rid of Medicare or shut off immigration to all countries other than Northern Europe, the way it was for a long time or pitch women out of Harvard and Yale and most universities and most jobs and go back or re criminalize homosexual relations, no conservatives want to do that. And yet they claim supremacy in an ideology that government overstepped back then that government is inefficient that we need to get rid of it that really verges on overt cynicism about the capacities of government and response to the great movements that set these things in motion. And the remarkable thing is that they were led by black people, that black people took the initiative to initiate not only their own liberation, but liberation for, for women and disabled people and gays and lesbians and all kinds of other things. What we're seeing now is that there's a huge gap between the empirical reality that ought to reinforce we, the people as a living active capacity in America, and instead we're trapped in the Trump era, which is the culmination of a 50 year retreat from the remarkable witness that was generated by a black led movement to say black lives matter sounds almost plaintive. Uh, especially if you realize that it was coined at a time when we had our first black president, of course, the black lives matter. He's, he's the president, but he's on tiptoes and very tentative about acknowledging that. And the Obama presidency basically existed for two terms to show that the world wouldn't fall apart if we had a black president, but it did not claim the legacy of the 1960s to say we are back and we should pay attention to that. We should be proud of it. When we dealt with, uh, racial inequities in the 1960s, it had benefited everyone instead where you're still kind of crippled or atrophied in our public discourse. So to me, it's a reminder of how remarkable that 1960s year old was that a lot of people want to say that Dr. King and the students in the sedans and the freedom rides and all that, all those movements had to be non-violent because a, they were Christians and they were taught to be non-violent and V because they were black, they couldn't do anything else. There's a grain of truth in that. But the more profound truth is that they recognized that nonviolence is the essence of democracy because democracy is built on votes and every vote is a piece of non-violence. And so the chief weapon that they had to advance, not only themselves, but the whole country was to really sink themselves deeply into what Dr. King called the deep Wells of democracy, the discipline, and the faith to do that. And that's what they did. So they were what I call modern founders. They were prophets and they helped America realize and go down the road toward liberation. And we've receded from that politically, even though we're still reaping the benefits empirically I

Speaker 1 35:32

Wanted to piggyback of democracy is non-violence for a moment, if you are fortunate enough or otherwise to go to a graduate school, to study history and study history on graphy, this conversation between historians, we talk a lot about reconstruction and then a second reconstruction, a web to boys was one of the people who kind of put the idea out that because reconstruction had failed in the aftermath of the civil war, that rights were given, and then taken away to a newly freed slaves that a second reconstruction would be needed. And then of course later historians like C Vann, Woodward had called the civil rights movement reconstruction, and that reconstruction is needed. It's not just like physical reconstruction, but it's like actually reconstructing our society, our suffrage reconstructing the ability to vote. And so I'm wondering how you would respond to somebody saying black lives matter, perhaps is a, the Harbinger's of a, of a third reconstruction

Speaker 4 36:26

Already saying that. I think there's a lot of truth to it. I hope what it does and what I'm trying to work on myself is I hope it stimulates people to realize how profound the first and second reconstructions were. Yes, it's true that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were more or less put to sleep for a century. And nobody seemed to notice it. I mean, everybody just shrugged and said, well, they're, they're guaranteeing the right black people to vote, but they can't vote, but that's not a big problem. What we ought to appreciate more. It was really remarkable that three times in four years, the United States put constitutional amendments in to do that. That's as a remarkable as the fact that it was overturned and overthrown by over terrorism, that is not really widely understood. I still say one of the greatest travesties in American historiography is that if you look at textbooks today for the official category and the naming of the period that mark the end of reconstruction, it's called redemption. The Redeemer's over through reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and restored white supremacy. That was the beginning of Jim Crow. But that's the official name. If you talk to historians, they won't know what you're talking about. If you use any other term. And what I hope people will see is how remarkable and tragic it is that modern historians, including liberal Eric Foner uses the term. I mean, people I admire greatly are using a sacred term to define a terrorist crime, uh, you know, a real crime against humanity. And they use it because how rare it is for historians who are usually strictly secular to adopt a sacred term and turn it on its head is really remarkable. And that shows how sensitive we are and why it's not remarkable that in the 1960s, when all this wonderful liberation was set loose, our politics could brainwash us to think that that wasn't happening. And that government was really bad. And it was full of nasty bureaucrats who were telling people where to live and stuff. And it was cultivated into a modern cynicism. That's very much like the aftermath of the first reconstruction. So I do think this is cyclical, and I think there are profound lessons there, but one of the first ones is that the people who are most disadvantaged took the greatest initiative and overturning in changing the direction of history. It's the message of black lives matter, the witness, the equivalent to the freedom rides, or w you know, cause you can't do the same thing over again. You've got to have something new, but it's not just having a slogan. It's having a program that develops. And that's what to me makes the periods 1960 to 1965. So remarkable because freedom, summer, and a lot of those things we're seeing that about as quixotic as you could ever be. And yet they gradually built up this momentum that got the civil rights act, the voting rights act and the immigration act reform act of 1965, all those things, landmarks toeholds in history that are still there. It's just that they're not appreciated the way they should be

Speaker 3 39:28

During the first segment of the show. Jay and I went chronologically through the basic history of civil rights, leading from the slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries, all the way up to George Floyd. We stopped there and wanted to kind of continue this conversation with you. And the biggest event that I witnessed within the last year since George Floyd passed away was the Lafayette park protest in Washington. And seeing that occur and attorney general Barr's response to the protest and just wanted to find out what your reaction was to that moment in history. And if you can cite any examples of the federal government overstepping their bounds, as far as they went during that protest,

Speaker 4 40:17

You had me from the very beginning, if you're talking about reviewing the period of slave patrols, slave patrols are virtually written out of history. I think most historians, if you ask them what a slave patrol was, they wouldn't really know because it was conveniently forgotten. And a moment's thought if you guys have been talking about it, you've probably already covered this, but goodness gracious. What kind of security system do you think was needed when you had 4 million slaves living out in dispersed rural areas in places where they outnumbered white families often to allow white men to leave their women and children there, it was such a pervasive system of surveillance and violence that it kept the number of slave rebellions to a minimum. Compare that to now, we now have two gigantic oceans protecting the continental United States from invasion. And yet we feel a national security need to have 800 military installations around the world. Think what the white slaveholders in the south, how much attention was devoted to that. I mean, an illustration I often use is that by law in Virginia, the established Anglican church had to read from the pulpit twice a year in Sunday services, the essential basics of the slave patrol, what their rules were, how people were drafted into it, what's their beats where it's the origin of the term beat in police work. And in fact, in many respects, it's the origin of the police system. So that was really pervasive and the reason it's instructive and the reason that it was shoved out of consciousness is because it's a reminder that the underpinnings of race relations in the United States where black and white are concerned our military, because there was no consent, slavery was based on violence. So the whole system was based on suppression in a physical way. Therefore it's not terribly surprising that there's a large aftermath of that. And police relations. The layout of cities when black people started moving into cities, was governed by a quasi military, not overt reaction to essentially bottle black people in the, into certain neighborhoods by redlining and a lot of other things and build up urban police systems as a security force. So we're trying to move out of a military base in our race relations to a fellow citizen basis. And it's hard to do when we're divided by neighborhoods, we're divided by schools, we're divided by our dinner parties, you know, by everything else that we have. And so what happened in Lafayette park was that the federal government felt either obliged or privileged. And I think it's an interesting argument, whether they felt that they needed to do that. They had to be more explicit about the fact or that they could be more explicit about the fact that when there's a black lives matter thing, the federal government can gain political credence through a show of force against, you know, their echoes of that. And what happened in Israel, Netanyahu benefited through a show of force. Politically governments sometimes use violence for its political effect. And I think what happened in, in Lafayette park was a reminder that there's still a lot of the subliminal political force in race relations is defined by and governed by violence. What's

Speaker 1 43:35

Really interesting to me is just like the civil rights history of the fifties and sixties. These historical forces are colliding, right? So there's this terrible event in the park. And then now the square is renamed black lives matter square after being named in the first place or lost, you know, right, right. It's goal George Washington for not freeing his slaves. And this brings me to an interesting question. I noticed that the civil rights history, not just as it's spoken about among historians, but generally of the fifties and sixties, it seems to be more based on the narratives about leaders. And we kind of organize the way we understand that history, whereas black lives matter at least so far seems to be much more about the movement. And it's less kind of individualized. I was wondering how you saw the way these narratives are kind of playing out in our public consciousness.

Speaker 4 44:27

I think that there's good and bad at that. I've met some of the black lives leaders at the Apollo theater every January. They always come and we sit backstage and talk and they are thinkers. And it's good that some of them remind me more of the snake leaders have to remember in the classical civil rights era. There were times when the snake leaders were way ahead of Dr. King. And then other times when he was ahead of them, then it was kind of a symbiosis with tension and criticism and everything, but they had different forms of leadership, you know, kind of citizen-based experimentation. And then old-fashioned Moses points the way through the red sea, more Martin Luther king, you had all of those things. Black lives matter has a lot of elements of snake, which is creative, but it does make you appreciate that the value of Martin Luther king was to establish a message that could cohere over time about a direction. You know, that was his great gift that he could talk about religion and politics and freedom and black and white, and never get criticized for mixing church and state because he never tried to subdue the church to the state or the state to the church. He always, as I say, he put one foot in the scripture and one foot in the constitution and said, take it either way. This is a movement about equal souls and equal vote, by the way, one antecedent of that extraordinary balance, which I think is the key to his rhetoric, which is it's one of the great functions that, that king provided that black lives mattered doesn't have yet. It doesn't have a tie to American patriotism and an agenda going forward that develops into something coherent that is larger than black lives matter. It's still to some degree, a black advocacy group advocating black interests, even though at the demonstrations I've been to the George Floyd demonstrations and everything. There's always been a pretty diverse crowd there. It's not just a black crowd. Dr. King got this idea of equal souls and equal votes from Abraham Heschel, who famously said that the Hebrew prophets starting with Amos in the eighth century BCE, this is almost 3000 years ago. We're the first people in history to say that state violence was evil. And that the definition of morality was that you would hold Kings accountable to the way they treated with widows and orphans because they had equal souls. And Heschel said, that's the antecedent of the idea that our votes should be equal, equal souls and equal votes developed in history to most people around the world to this very day, it's preposterous that everybody's vote should count equal. And that votes that is all these little pieces of nonviolence that we stick in ballot boxes all the time should be more important than Putin security agency or the Chinese communist party or whoever's ruling in Turkey or Egypt or anywhere else. Most people do not have the established confidence that votes meaning non-violence matter. And king and Heschel, Heschel, March with him at Selma and everything. But the more important thing is that king would go up to the Catskills all the time, up there into the borscht belt and meet with rabbis and talk about the Jewish underpinnings or equal souls and equal votes. And that's a sturdiness and a profundity about both movements. That's often overlooked. It's part of denigrating this and saying, yes, it happened. And we'll take the fact that women are in Yale as a consequence of it, or quite frankly, most people don't see it as a con. They just think that it happened and maybe women did it, but we don't really want to acknowledge the profound leadership. We don't want to see Dr. King as somebody functioning more or less like Madison and Jefferson founders confronting systems of hierarchy and subjugation and figuring out how to move the whole society toward equal citizenship and justice based on votes. That's a tremendous function. I'm writing now a lot about Bob Moses and Diane Nash, trying to say that if I can capture the role that they played in history alongside Dr. King, I think people should realize that they deserve more or less the same attention that Benjamin Franklin would get if he were still alive today, because that's what they're doing, but we don't see it that way. We write off the civil rights movement as something that they did for themselves and not something that they did for us. I

Speaker 3 48:46

Feel it should be recognized that we are three white people having a conversation about African-American civil rights and black lives matter with that said, how can white people act as allies to this movement? What are some common mistakes and misconceptions that we as white people make and how can we move forward?

Speaker 4 49:11

Uh, that's a good question. I think the most common mistake that any outsider to a movement makes is the assumption that what really matters is what label or what conception you have, how you frame your relationship to black lives matter. I think black lives matter is good for this, that or the other. I E some sort of intellectual response and framework. A lot of our political discussion about race is people trying to form a defensible, if not superior position in an argumentative stance. My lesson from talking to people in the civil rights movement is what really matters is how much people go across the boundaries, not of thought, but of comfort, how much interaction there is. You know, I think anti-racist is maybe a step forward from just protesting racism, but it's a very, very negative goal in the sense that your ultimate role is to be against racism properly understood. If we had more interaction in where we live and how we live and everything, the real question is how interracial is your life compared say, without ethnic your life is apart from the black white divide, which is still the one that is the hardest. In other words, are you even aware of how much your life interacts with Scandinavians, with Italians, with Lutherans? These are people that slaughtered each other for hundreds of years over the differences between Catholic and Protestant, and they got over it. And we've gotten to a remarkable in my neighborhood here in Baltimore. When I first moved here, I had a black real estate agent saying I wanted to live in a mixed neighborhood. And she showed me around Mount Washington. And I said, this is really fine, but I don't see very many black neighborhoods driving around. I love neighbors. I love the houses. And she said, honey, in Baltimore, a mixed neighborhood is Christians and Jews. We don't have any mixed black and white yet, but we do have mixed Christians and Jews. And that's it. Wasn't always that way. If you look at, you know, all of Barry Levinson's movies about there were streets that the Jews couldn't cross, you know, only 40 or 50 years ago. So we have lived inter-ethnic lives. That's one of the reasons why I think the immigration reform act of 1965 Johnson deserves enormous credit for that, because it literally did turn us into a multiethnic multicultural democracy with communities drawn from the whole world. And we were not that before there, you know, we excluded Asians, we excluded all of Sub-Sahara Africa. You could not become an immigrant. You could not become a naturalized citizen. And today, if you go to a naturalization ceremony, it's one of the most inspiring patriotic events you can see because you realize we are founded on an idea that no other country is that way. And to some degree against Trump and everything else that's happening and all that wind before it, we are making progress toward that multiethnic democracy. And in that sense, we were light to the world, but our politics are still dragging. And quite frankly, liberals are dragging. Liberals are constantly aware that they don't want to get too exposed. Democrats have been worried about losing elections ever since the sixties, if they talk too much about race and by not doing it, they advertise how squeamish they are. And that's how they lose elections because the opposite side knows that and takes advantage of it and figures out ways to take advantage. Yeah, a lot

Speaker 1 52:49

Of what we've talked about in past episodes has been kind of the dangers of right-wing populism and fascism and how that's very much linked to racist ideology and then efforts to combat that and to push back in various ways, education or the new deal, or, you know, things of that nature. I was wondering if you saw any antecedents in the 1930s and forties, this period that we've been very focused on of the civil rights, movement and signs that we could maybe look at now, if black lives matter is another chapter and there may be further chapters. And if we see some parallels to that period of time, of course, there's lots of ways to interpret it. What analogs do you see in the 1930s and forties that led to liberation civil rights movements?

Speaker 4 53:32

There were a few honest appraisals to try to figure out how did the 1930s happen? How did Hitler come to power? I mean, people recognizing that he never came to power on the basis of a majority opinion that a minority of the country took it over and then controlled it in a totalitarian sense. How did that happen and who helped them? And one of the more remarkable parts of that reappraisal to me was Vatican council too, in which, for the only time in history, there are only been well, they used to have Vatican councils, but they hadn't had one since 1870, the Pope John, the 23rd said, I want to appraise to what degree Catholic teaching is complicit in the Holocaust because we'd been teaching that the Jews are deicide people, Christ killers for a thousand years. And that was pretty amazing. And I guarantee you, it caused a hemorrhage within the broad Catholic church because you had these bishops all out in Arab Muslim countries where just about the only thing they had going for them was that they didn't like Jews and they didn't want to give it up. And a lot of them in other countries could not separate their professed love from Jesus, from their contempt for Jews. And to me, one of the most remarkable witnesses in all of civil rights is that Heschel a Hasidic rabbi, like the seventh generation out of Poland, who was controversial among Jews, because he even talked to Christians. I don't know that anybody has ever had chutzpah like this. He went to the Pope himself and told him that he thought Christians were misinterpreting Christian teaching about the death of Christ, because as he understood Christian doctrine, Jesus died for the sins of all mankind. And therefore it was not a specific cause like you could solve it. That was his purpose. His whole purpose was to accept the sins of all mankind. And they tried to say, at the end of this, they equivocated in the Vatican council and said at the very end of the Nostra Tati their proclamation about the Holocaust, they said they still look forward to the end of time when all Jews would be reconciled to the true church and would become professing Catholics alongside Hindus and Protestants and everybody else, because it was a super session it's doctrine. And Heschel went to the Pope again and said, rather than renounce or repudiate my faith, I would go back to Auschwitz. All Jews died at Auschwitz, but we didn't kill our faith. If we renounced our faith, it would just continue the Holocaust because there would be no moral basis in the world. And what came out instead of that super session is because the conversion cause that's how they call it, that the whole world would convert was a remarkable sentence that said, we look forward to the end of time when all peoples on earth will call on the Lord in one and serve God shoulder to shoulder, meaning horizontal, you know, as brothers, horizontal relationships among all faiths that still official Catholic doctrine. To me, it is a huge landmark that should be reminded of, of the church because it laps from you don't hear them. They don't brag about it. It's like liberals. Don't brag about the fact that the civil rights movement widened democracy for everybody Catholic theologians, especially the ones that we have had do not go around and say that that beacon council may have equivocated on DSI, but it set a landmark for all religions, as far as their relationship to one another. And setting aside the things that still allow religious people to slaughter each other, Shiites and Sunni's and Jews and Palestinians on the basis of reality. So the civil rights period has things in it that are not appreciated because we tend to want to kind of denigrate it as a time when Martin Luther king got carried away with turning the other cheek and became extremely Christian and brought out the essential, good nature and American light folks to pass the civil rights acts. And there may be some more things to clean up, but we basically broke the back back then. It's a much more pervasive thing that is much more at the ground of how deep our racial problems are, but also how they are the basis for our hope that when you deal with race, you are rescuing, nurturing, and pushing forward the hope to save the world, the hope for the climate crisis, the hope to control war. It's still there. There's still a pretty good guy. What

Speaker 3 58:01

I'd like to do is have you put on your predictive hat, so to speak and tell us from your perspective, where do we go from here? Where do you see all of this going? This specific black lives matter movement? How do you see it moving forward in the landscape that we are the political and cultural landscape that we're in right now. And what advice do you have for the black lives matter leaders?

Speaker 4 58:26

I think what we need is a creative agenda of hope for the restoration of our public confidence and explicit acknowledgement that we have become cynical liberals and conservatives, and not to mention a lot of people in the press and that we cannot afford to have an atrophied sense of the capacity of democracy in a time when, even if we were as optimistic as we were in the 1950s, having won world war two and set off to the moon and conquered polio and trust in all three branches of government was sky high. And we pulled off the civil rights. Even if we had that again, it would be hard to advance on black lives matter, and it would be very hard to advance on climate change. These would be hard even if we were repaired. So I think one of the most urgent things, and, and we're not repaired, you know, we're at each other's throats. I mean, Lyndon Johnson had 285 Democrats in the house in 1965. Uh, Franklin Roosevelt had 313, whereas we're, you know, almost neck and neck and literally neck and neck in the Senate. And there's not a lot of optimism. And it's a long range project to restore not only civil relationships and better relations among the racist, but to restore our sense of civic, health and optimism. You know what Bob Moses does? We discovered that we do the same thing. I guess this is kind of an answer to that in our lectures. I don't because of COVID I don't do as many public lectures, but Bob Moses and I, by doing some programs together, discover that we both recite the preamble to the constitution and our talks to remind people how unbelievably optimistic and ambitious it is that we, the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity hereby establishing an ordain this constitution for the United States of America. It's only one sentence, but every one of those verbs and stating the function and what you're doing is unbelievably optimistic about the promise of we, the people. And we've lost a lot of that. I wish that at every debate, the candidates would recite it just so it would make it a little harder for them to lapse into cynicism as quickly as they commonly do or into half-baked optimism. We have a long way to go to restore that. So I'm always for experimentation. Nobody knew that the civil rights movement would break out on a bus boycott or college students in sit ins or freedom ride or any of the things that Bob Moses did. They were amazing. I'm all for them trying new things to get other people involved. But every action that they took was always inviting people to cross the line and show their di that's what a movement is, is when you literally move and you're moved by it and then it grows. So I think they are right to try to keep coming up with things that would allow us to come together to kneel for nine minutes. The way people did all over the country after George Floyd. But they also, I think, need to develop more messages that connect to the only thing. The civil rights movement felt really gave them leverage in the deep Wells of democracy that they had to understand them, that they had to understand them and then raise it up so that their movement connected to it, which is what made king. So phenomenally,

Speaker 2 1:02:05

This reminds me of a phrase that I've heard repeated many times since 2017, that the only antidote to hate is community building community.[inaudible] see on wall street, it's brought to you by elusive films maker of the Nazi on wall streets, film, and television series. It was recorded and edited by EGA Russo. Original music was written and performed by Joseph Mulholland. We can't bring these stories to life on screen without your support. So please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign@elusive-films.com. That's elusive hyphen films.com for Jason Wexel Baum I'm EGA Russo. Thank you. And we will see you next episode.